Tag Archives: children

If I can’t find your kindergarten, you’ll have to be homeschooled

We intend to send our son to kindergarten in the fall. Many parents are delaying kindergarten an extra year for their kids. That’s their choice and I respect it, but the way I figure it, the sooner he goes to school, the sooner he graduates, and the sooner he can begin working and saving money for that posh retirement home his parents will so richly deserve in their golden years. Even one year of lost wages could tarnish the first-class accommodations I’m owed.

I feel like, out of all the people holding clipboards who knock on our door at dinner time, one of them should be the person who signs up your kid for kindergarten and tells you where to leave him on that fateful morning in September. So far, none of them have been that person, and I begin to fear that such a helpful solicitor does not exist. We may have to leave the house to get the boy enrolled in school, and to find out where that school is.

In my youth, there was only one elementary school in town, if you happened to live in one of the towns that was on the whole education bandwagon. As long as your parents got you to the door of that school during daylight hours, with some kind of identification tag pinned to you, you were officially enrolled. There weren’t so many forms with nosey questions about residency and immunizations. The teachers were experienced at picking out the potentially rabid, and these were set outside the classroom door to become the school nurse’s problem. Life went on without a fuss, except for the minor difficultly of having to often find a new school nurse.

show and tell

Checking the pack of new pupils for signs of hydrophobia and ticks. (Image: Frances Benjamin Johnston)

There are several elementary schools in our district. I’m pretty sure our boy will go to the nearest one, rather than the one whose data entry person picks our packet out of the stack. I found a map and our house is in the area outlined in blue marker, so I think that means our son will attend the blue area school.

I went to our district’s web site and opened up the enrollment form. I scrolled all the way down through the many pages of forms until I hit the Acceptable Use Policy. Somehow, I doubt that my son will be running an online dating site from the PC in his kindergarten classroom. He’ll bring his own laptop for that.

I finally had to navigate over to espn.com and take some deep breaths to stop the hyperventilating. Why do they need to know more about my kid than I do? Now I’ve got research to do. Maybe I’ll Google him. I wonder if he’s got a Wikipedia page.

It all seems kind of daunting and confusing right now, but I expect we (my wife) will figure it out by autumn. If not, the boy will be another kid whose advent into kindergarten will be pushed back a year. That wouldn’t be so bad except for the dent it will put into my retirement plans.

Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated

Our four-year-old had a friend over. I was watching a basketball game while they played nearby. They began discussing their respective lineages. How four-year-olds get into such a discussion, I don’t know. There must be something about toy trains that leads naturally into ancestry.

I let the ballgame fade away as I focused myself upon a little parental eavesdropping. I wanted to know what my son had retained from the things I’d told him about his family.

“My grandfather was a soldier,” he told his friend.

That was very nearly correct. It was his great-grandfather, but that’s all the same to a preschooler.

“He died when he got old,” my son continued.

Correct. He was about 70, which seems ancient when you’re four.

“My grandsister died too. She was sick.”

Grandsister? I don’t know what closet he pulled her out of; I’m sure I’ve never mentioned a sickly grandsister.

“And,” he said, with no more emotion than he’d displayed when recounting the demise of his faceless grandsister, “my father died because somebody shot him.”

What? I’m sitting right here!

Number 1: You’re clearly lying.

Number 2: It’s rude to speak of someone’s grisly death right in front of him.

Number 3: If you’re going to tell people I’m dead, at least act a little cut up over it!

His friend pointed out that I was quite nearby, and although I displayed all the vigor of a declining couch potato, it was clear that I still clung to my low-grade existence. My son dropped the subject and picked up a locomotive engine.

A lot of thoughts go through your head at that moment when your son first begins to tell people that you are dead. Once you eliminate malice as a motive, you are assailed by a Twilight Zone of possible interpretations:

Is he a psychic, unwittingly foretelling my violent demise? Well, he didn’t see a Time Out coming when he threw a tennis ball at the TV screen, so his psychic powers can’t be too polished.

Am I seeing him in the future, when I really am shot and killed? It still wouldn’t hurt him to show a little grief over the event.

Does he see dead people (i.e. me)? Well, if I’m already dead, his friend, his brother, his mother, all my co-workers, and the guy who flipped me off in traffic this morning can see me too, which gives death no advantages over life.

After the shock of my untimely end wore off, I realized the truth. It had nothing more to do with the Twilight Zone than that my boy might have written for the show if he’d been around at the time. The kid is a storyteller. He likes storytelling so much that he blurts out the plot before taking time to review its plausibility. He said I died because he wanted to keep the story going and the word father came to him before he could conjure up a grandbrother.

The boy likes to spin a yarn, and since I have never been one to embellish any story or make any tale taller by a few inches, I can only blame his mother.

drawing of army man

A storyteller and an artist too: This is the boy’s illustration of his great-grandfather. I can only assume that the stain on his uniform is mud and/or coffee. War is dirty business, and, if this soldier was anything like his great-grandchildren, most of his drinks ended up on his clothes.

A boy’s natural biological urge to vacuum

Now that Santa has rewarded her devotion with a new and useful vacuum cleaner, my wife is no longer crippled by inferior equipment and can finally display her vacuumin’ acumen to its fullest potential. Nobody hits a carpet with more gusto than she does.  If vacuums could pick up juice stains, you’d be able to eat off our carpets, as our children often do, juice stains notwithstanding.

I am starting to suspect that our baby has inherited an appreciation for a quality vacuum cleaner from his mother. I don’t know for sure which chromosome carries the Vacuum Cleaner Appreciation Gene, but I’m pretty sure he’s got it, and I’m equally sure he didn’t get it from me.

I haven’t run any experiments on this hypothesis, but I think a lot of babies would be afraid of the vacuum cleaner, or at least be indifferent to it. Our baby chases it. He follows the vacuum cleaner around as if he wants nothing more than to give that glorious dirt buster a giant hug. He is absolutely fascinated by the machine.

boy chasing vacuum

Vacuum wrangling tip #1: Dress appropriately for the job. A proper rodeo clown outfit tells the world that you a serious vacuum chaser.

I recall him following the old, junky vacuum around sometimes, but I don’t think that was for love of the machine. I think he was just looking for the crumbs it turned up and left behind it so he could see how they tasted. There was no better way to discover interesting crumbs in our house than to follow the old vacuum and sift through its tailings.

boy approaching vacuum

Vacuum wrangling tip #2: If you want to catch a moving vacuum in the open, you’ve got to take the right angle to intercept its path.

Even when the new vacuum is not on, the kid can’t stay away. He has to touch its various parts and see how they fit together. It’s a really good vacuum, but I can’t help but think that he is working out some improvements in his head. Maybe he’s trying to figure out why the wheels don’t fall off, because every vacuum he’s ever known before had wheels that fell off.

boy with vacuum cord

Vacuum wrangling tip #3: Get a firm grip on the animal’s tail; he can’t get away if you’ve got his tail.

boy with vacuum attachments

Vacuum wrangling tip #4: Take the bull by the horns. If you can’t find any horns, take it by the upholstery attachment.

Come to think of it, his big brother has a bit of a vacuum fixation too. If he spots a floor sweeper in a restaurant, look out, especially if you are part of the wait staff. He’s tripped a waiter or two in his zeal to make dining room carpets more appealing to customers. It turns out that carpet sweepers don’t pick up juice (or wine, or beer) stains either.

boy reaching out toward vacuum

Vacuum wrangling tip #5: Become one with the beast. Soothe it with gentle caresses or, preferably, a Vulcan mind meld.

Without the benefit of any professional psychological assessments, I’m going to posit that my family’s fascination with vacuum cleaners is a good thing. Yes, it may be a little unusual, but I look at it this way: if these kids are that enthused about the prospect of pushing a vacuum, they have already set themselves upon the slippery slope that leads to mowing the lawn. When the boys discover how much louder, hotter, sharper, and  generally more dangerous lawn mowers are, they’re sure to want to trade up. Call the vacuum a gateway machine; it works for me.

I don’t like having to fire you, Daddy, but you leave me no choice

We scarcely recognize the number of threats we use to coerce our children into doing what we want them to do. If they talk back, we threaten them with Time Out. If they don’t eat all their dinner, we threaten to withhold dessert. When things get really serious, we threaten to leave them with the babysitter who wears too much I’m-an-icky-old-lady perfume. Tough love, right?

In our house, we would use fewer threats if our preschooler were more reasonable. Sometimes he is reasonable, and we come to a mutually agreeable resolution to a conflict. Other times, he wants to play like North Korea, and we have to start rolling out the ultimatums.

It made us realize the number of threats we employ with our child when he started loading threats into his own ammunition box of manipulative strategies. Then we got to hear what we sound like to him.

I hope our threats don’t sound quite as twisted as his do, but I guess we can never really know that. Maybe our threats fall into the same eyebrow-raising categories as his do:

The Logical, yet ineffectual threat:

“If you don’t take me to the toy store, you can’t get a toy.”

The Completely unrelated cause and effect threat:

“If you don’t give me some potato chips, Santa’s not gonna bring you anything for Christmas.”

The If I can’t touch you, I’ll get to you through your loved ones threat:

“If you don’t put on cartoons, I’m gonna throw this Thomas train at the cat.”

His biggest problem with issuing threats is that all of his are idle ones (except for me not getting a toy). He doesn’t want to hurt the cat; he loves the cat, and Santa always brings me something nice. A lot of grown-ups don’t understand the elements of a threat, so it’s no insult to him to say that he’s still working it out. Coercion is a difficult subject to master.

Vader in toy department

“If you don’t buy me a toy, I will command the Death Star to obliterate your puny planet.”

He hasn’t learned all his threats from his parents, though. One of his favorite threats comes from a cartoon. It’s the you’re fired threat. It goes like this: “Daddy, if you put any carrots on my plate, you’re fired!” This threat is a running joke between us. He uses it to tell me how he feels about different things, like carrots. I fire him sometimes too.

One day, his mother was calling from the next room for him to go clean up a mess he had left there. He went, but before he did, he rolled his eyes and casually told me, “She’s fired.”

boy with first fish caught

“I don’t care if it’s the first fish I ever caught; if you don’t get that slimy thing away from my face, you’re fired!”

I like the you’re fired threat. It gives him a light-hearted way to express his feelings about various situations. It lets him sound me out to see how far he can press an issue with me. Besides, I know he could never follow through on it. You have to be the boss to fire somebody, and he’s not the boss of Daddy. I happen to know that Mommy is the boss.